Lawmaker Dogs Navy Over Iowa Inquiry

February 12, 1990|By ROBERT BECKER Staff Writer

WASHINGTON — A congressional committee usually known for its harmonious support of the military was transformed into a chorus of disapproval last December, as a House Armed Services subcommittee drummed the Navy for its investigation of the explosion aboard the USS Iowa.

The chief orchestrator of the performance was Rep. Nicholas Mavroules, D-Mass., the white-haired, soft-spoken chairman of the defense subcommittee, who harshly criticized the Navy's conclusion that the April 19 explosion was the result of an intentional act by 24-year-old gunners mate Clayton M. Hartwig.

"If that were my son, I'd be all over you like a hound dog. You wouldn't hear the end of it," Mavroules told Adm. Joseph S. Donnell, commander of the Navy's Atlantic surface forces. "And if that were your son, you'd be all over me."

Nearly three months later, Mavroules continues to dog the Navy and what he believes to be a flawed investigation. The Navy is standing by its report.

The House Armed Services subcommittee on investigations, which held three days of hearings in December, will release in the next week its report into the Iowa explosion and the Navy's subsequent investigation, said Mavroules.

He said he can't discuss the subcommittee's findings, adding that his staff is still collecting information.

"We want to make sure we do it right, and we want to be fair," Mavroules said. "We're still talking to some people out there."

In an interview in his Rayburn Building office south of the Capitol, Mavroules said he remains disturbed about the way the investigation was handled.

He believes that both the FBI and the Naval Investigative Service committed serious errors.

Among his concerns are that evidence was washed overboard, that the NIS waited three weeks before beginning its investigation, and that the FBI didn't conduct its own independent inquiry.

Those contribute to the "many unanswered questions" that cloud the Navy's investigation, Mavroules said.

Also bothersome, he said, is his feeling that the Iowa investigation "is beginning to look somewhat similar" to the inquiry into the 1983 terrorist truck bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut.

In both instances, Mavroules said, a single individual "has taken the hit."

"They're laying the wood to one individual," he said of the Navy's conclusion that Hartwig caused the explosion by planting some type of detonator between two bags of gun propellent. "Even to the point where it was intimated that he might have been a homosexual, which has absolutely nothing to do with it."

The December hearings focused on the Navy's criminal and technical investigations into the explosion that rocked the No. 2 turret of the Iowa.

A succession of experts appeared before Mavroules' subcommittee, refuting the Navy's portrayal of Harwtig as a suicidal loner and discounting the Navy's technical evidence that chemicals and strands of iron wire found embedded in the shell pried from the barrel indicated the presence of a detonator.

Mavroules said the Navy's problem explaining the detonator was one of several problems he found with the report. When the report was released, the Navy said it thought the detonator was made with an electronic timer. A few weeks later, the Navy said the detonator was likely a pressure-sensitive chemical device made from brake fluid and swimming pool cleaner.

That switch, Mavroules said, "made it even more improbable to come to a conclusion" that Hartwig had acted as a saboteur.

"Yet they came to a conclusion without 100 percent documentation," he said. "That's wrong, that's wrong, that's not the right thing to do."

Mavroules added that the Navy "would have been so much better off to say it could have been this or that, but we just don't know. They're not saying that at all."

Mavroules said crucial failures by the NIS and the FBI made any kind of firm conclusion difficult.

"They should have been right there," he said of the NIS, which failed to enter the investigation until three weeks after the blasts. "You have a NIS officer on every ship. He should have been right on top."

Robert Powers, NIS' director of criminal investigations, admitted to Mavroules that the service "screwed up" by not entering the investigation earlier. But they had argued that much of the evidence was destroyed in the blast or washed overboard in the clean-up.

Mavroules countered: "How do they know? They weren't there."

He characterized the NIS as "very strident in their views" about Hartwig. He said that for the NIS to saddle Hartwig with the blame was "absolutely wrong."

"The guy's dead," Mavroules said. "He can't defend himself."

Despite his criticism of the NIS, Mavroules said that the agency was qualified to do the job and had good experts and good people.